WE WERE SO BEAUTIFUL!

mylifeasafeminista:

Sonya Renee Taylor, “What Women Deserve”

Culturally-diversified biracial girl with
a small diamond nose ring and a pretty smile
poses besides the words 
“Women Deserve Better”. 

and I almost let her non-threatening grin
begin to infiltrate my psyche 
until I read the unlikely small print
at the bottom of the ad: 
Sponsored by the US Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities 
and the Knights of Columbus 

On a bus 
in a city 
with a population of 553,000, 
4 teenage mothers on the bus with me,
1 Latina woman with 3 children under 3 
and no signs of a daddy. 

One sixteen year old black girl 
standing in 22-degree weather 
with only a sweater 
a book bag 
and a bassinette,
with an infant that ain’t even four weeks yet
tell me that Yes …. 

Women do deserve better. 

Women deserve better 
than public transportation rhetoric 
from the same people who 
won’t give that teenage mother 
a ride to the next transit. 
Won’t let you talk to their kids about safer sex
Have never had to listen as the door SLAMS 
behind the man who adamantly says,
“That shit” ain’t his 
leaving her to wonder how she’ll raise this kid. 

Women deserve better 
than the 300 dollars TANF and AFC 
will provide that family of three
or the 6 dollar an hour job at KFC
with no benefits for her new baby
or the college degree she may never see
because you can’t have infants at the university 

Women deserve better 
than lip service paid for by politicians 
who have no alternatives to abortion 
though I am sure 
right this moment one of their seventeen year old daughters 
is sitting in a clinic lobby 
sobbing quietly and anonymously
praying parents don’t find out
or will be waiting for mom to pick her up because research shows 
that out-of-wedlock childbirth doesn’t look good on political polls and 
Daddy ain’t having that. 

Women deserve better 
than backwards governmental policies 
that don’t want to pay 
for welfare for kids
or health care for kids 
or child care for kids
Don’t want to pay living wages to working mothers, 
Don’t want to make men who only want to be last night’s lovers 
responsible for the semen they lay. 

Flat out don’t want to pay for SHIT
but want to control the woman who’s having it.
Acting outraged at abortion.
Well I’m outraged 
that they want us to believe 
that they believe 
that women deserve better. 

The Vatican won’t prosecute pedophile priests
But I decide I’m not ready for motherhood
and it’s condemnation for me
These are the same people who won’t support 
national condom distribution to prevent teenage pregnancy.
But women deserve better. 

Women deserve better 
than back-alley surgeries 
that leave our wombs barren and empty.
Deserve better 
than organizations bearing the name 
of land-stealing racist rapists 
funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains
with no money to give these women
while balding middle-aged white men
tell us what to do with our bodies
while they wage wars and kill other people’s babies 

So maybe women deserve better 
than propaganda and lies
to get into office
Propaganda and lies 
to get into panties
to get out of court
to get out of paying child support 

Get the fuck out of our decisions
and give us back our voice
Women do deserve better
Women deserve choice

(via meandthestereo)

shepherdsnotsheep:andreaisace:sheedemilio:graffitidc:

Jamila Woods. WATCH!

“I had a perm once, then I cut it off, and my hair is still beautiful, and my hair is not more black, but still black.”

alexandra-ewing:

I have very specific tumblr traditions. Thanksgiving is Christina Ricci Appreciation Day; on February 1st, I forget to post that I’ve been on tumblr for x many years (it’s been four now! thanks, everyone, for making this social media platform one I am still using after four years!); at Christmas I do my best to post all the Christmas songs I can think of knowing it will annoy Robyn. There is a day in June that is my Amstellarversary.

Every Valentine’s Day, I post Beau Sia’s “Love.” I wouldn’t have it any other way, and it’s not a Valentine’s Day without this.

I basically have no tumblr traditions except that every year Alex posts this video, I reblog it.

Beau Sia, “Love”

(via:fuckmedapperqueer)

There are a hundred ways to slip between the cracks of our not so credible cultural assumptions about race and religion. Most people are surprised that my father is Chinese. Like there’s some kind of preconditioned look for the half-Chinese, lesbian poet who used to be Catholic, but now believes in dreams.

Staceyann Chin “Womanist or Feminist”

(via gang-of-idiots)

actuallytheidiot:lipstick-feminists:

TW

writedrunk-editsober:

For years you hid your tampons between mattresses, cut your hair short, lowered your voice, collected ace bandages and baggy clothes. Small town talk stuck to your shoulders, you nervously shuffled around gas stations, never looked men in the eyes. We share unwanted wombs. While mine collects cobwebs, yours lies in a coffin in Nebraska.

This is the state that made you famous, handed movie scripts to Hilary Swank. Your murder was Oscar worthy. We are walking obituaries. Your hate crime headline already carved across my forehead, people look at me and see your delicate hands and absent adam’s apple.

Brother, I’m afraid to use the bathroom… (Walk in, head down, don’t look at another guy.) I’m afraid I’ll be discovered… (Don’t talk, dont stare, don’t piss too quickly.) Some thick armed man will call me a queer, tell me to show him my tits. Suddenly I’m thrown against faucets, spit in my face, workboot gutting my stomach. I see you on the movie screen and wonder if it’s my reflection. I watch them push you into the dirt and drag me into their car as they break our bodies in between our thighs.

Brother, did it hurt when you kissed her goodbye? Did you know you were breaking your promise when you told her you’d come back? Did your parents panic? Buy you a prom dress? Struggle over pronouns at family gatherings? And how long did it take your girlfriend to run her hands along your skin, soft as hers? Did she leave her eyes open?

We are carcasses. Untouched boxes of condoms. We are public secrets, playground jokes, and horror films. We are costumes, stuffing, binding and makeup. We aren’t real men to them. Invisible til we’re screaming. They don’t remember our names until they read them on our tombstones.

They exposed you. Decided you’re better off as splattered ink on newspaper. Used you as a warning for the rest of us. And there are days when it works. Sometimes I forget that sidewalks can be safe. Sometimes I confuse their shooting eyes for the bullet that met yours. Sometimes I imagine the phone call my mother would get. Can almost hear my sobbing friends. Smell the lillies on my casket. Touch my girlfriend’s black dress. But brother, I am trying to be brave.

(Source: coffee-black-egg-white)

Andrea Gibson “How it Ends”

It’s been 3 years,
10 months,
And 27 days
Since the first time I saw you naked
Since the night you ripped off your shirt,
Stuck your boobs in my face and said,
“Touch them”
I touched them like a diabetic third grader opening a Snickers bar
You said,
“Hard”
I thought, Yes I am
But you are so soft
I said,
“Your lips, they’re like whale blubber—”
That wasn’t my best line
But it worked

Tonight in the grocery store, I found one of your hairs in my underwear
I pulled it out in the frozen food section and screamed,
”That is so gorgeous, it could kill a man!”
Good thing I’m a leprechaun
Lucky,
Lucky

Baby, I have no idea how this will end
Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from the earth’s hips and our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th anniversary
Or maybe tomorrow, my absolute insanity
Combined with the absolute obstacle course of your communication skills will leave us
Like a love letter
In a landfill
But whatever,
Whenever,
However this ends,
I want you to know, that right now,
I love you forever
I love you for the hardest mile we walked together,
For the day I collected every sharp knife in the house
And threw them one by one on the roof
Then told the sun,
“Listen show off, 
From now on, you are only to give me blades of grass—things that are growing and soft
‘Cause there’s this girl who says she wants to float on her back through my bloodstream
And when she does,
I want my rivers to reach the sea”

D’you hear me, lover?
Do you know, the night you told me you had a crush on my ears, I swore to never to become Van Gogh
And look, baby,
They are both still there
Just like my firefly heart is still right there in your glass jar
I never trusted anybody more to poke enough holes in the lid
So on the nights you sleep like a ballerina, 
I try to snore like a piccolo
And I press my lips to your holy temples
And I say, 
I crash in to things in the dark
Even when the lights are on
And I am wrong more often than I am writing
And even then, I am often wrong

But when my friends are in the bathroom at the bar
Rolling dollar bills into telescopes,
And claiming they can see God,
I will come to you
Holding my grandmother’s Bible,
I will press it to your chest and I will bless it with your breath
And when you ask if I wanna role-play altar boys fucking in the church kitchen during Sunday Mass
I will say,
Hell yes!
But only if you leave a hickey on my ass
In the shape of Jesus’ palm,
So I can be sure I got nailed
Down

Lover,
You will never lose me to the wind
You are the lightning that made me fill my chest with candles
You are the thunder clapping for the poem that nobody else wants to hear
You are an icicle’s tear
Watering a tulip on the first day of spring
You melt me alive
You kiss me as deep as my roots will reach and I want nothing more
Than to be an eyelash fallen on your cheek
A thing collected by your fingers
And held like a wish
I promise whatever I do
I will always try my best 
To come true

I posted this earlier in the year but it’s still absolutely. breathtaking.

(via bittyscunt)

youcancuttheflower:

If only out of vanity
I have wondered what kind of woman I will be
when I am well past the summer of my raging youth
Will I still be raising revolutionary flags
and making impassioned speeches
that stir up anger in the hearts of pseudo-liberals
dressed in navy-blue conservative wear

In those years when I am grateful
I still have a good sturdy bladder
that does not leak undigested prune juice
onto diapers—no longer adorable
will I be more grateful for that
than for any forward movement in any current political cause
and will it have been worth it then
Will it have been worth the long hours
of not sleeping
that produced little more than reams
of badly written verses that catapulted me into literary spasms
but did not even whet the appetite
of the three O’ clock crowd
in the least respected of the New York poetry cafes

Will I wish then that I had taken that job working at the bank
or the one to watch that old lady drool
all over her soft boiled eggs
as she tells me how she was a raving beauty in the sixties
how she could have had any man she wanted
but she chose the one least likely to succeed
and that’s why when the son of a bitch died
she had to move into this place
because it was government subsidized

Will I tell my young attendant
how slender I was then
and paint for her pictures
of the young me more beautiful than I ever was
if only to make her forget the shriveled paper skin
the stained but even dental plates
and the faint smell of urine that tends to linger
in places built especially for revolutionaries
whose causes have been won
or forgotten

Will I still be lesbian then
or will the church or family finally convince me
to marry some man with a smaller dick
than the one my woman uses to afford me
violent and multiple orgasms

Will the staff smile at me
humor my eccentricities to my face
but laugh at me in their private resting rooms
saying she must have been something in her day

Most days I don’t know what I will be like then
but everyday—I know what I want to be now
I want to be that voice that makes Guilani
so scared he hires two (butch) black bodyguards

I want to write the poem
that The New York Times cannot print
because it might start some kind of black or lesbian
or even a white revolution

I want to go to secret meetings and under the guise
of female friendship I want to bed the women
of those young and eager revolutionaries
with too much zeal for their cause
and too little passion for the women
who follow them from city to city
all the while waiting in separate rooms

I want to be forty years old
and weigh three hundred pounds
and ride a motorcycle in the wintertime
with four hell raising children
and a one hundred ten pound female lover
who writes poetry about my life
and my children and loves me
like no one has ever loved me before

I want to be the girl your parents will use
as a bad example of a lady

I want to be the dyke who likes to fuck men

I want to be the politician who never lies

I want to be the girl who never cries

I want to go down in history
in a chapter marked miscellaneous
because the writers could find
no other way to categorize me
In this world where classification is key
I want to erase the straight lines
So I can be me

(via meandthestereo)

meandthestereo:

I figured anyone who had ever suffered at the hand of oppression would never be insensitive to MY mother’s struggle.

I will ALWAYS reblog Beau Sia.

(via:thirdeyeblinking)

I can guarantee a haircut will never tell you anything about someone’s gender, who they love, or how they fuck.

Andrea Gibson “The Jewelry Store”